Cotton Mather, 1663-1728.

All the accumulated piety and learning of his distinguished ancestry seemed to reside in this extraordinary man. His intellectuality was abnormal. He had read Homer at ten years of age, and at eleven was admitted to Harvard College. He took his first degree at fifteen; at seventeen he began to preach, and soon afterward became associate with his father. In his religious life, he became abnormal also; at times he lay for hours on the floor of his study in spiritual agony. His speech was full of pious ejaculations. His “Memorable Providence Relating to Witchcrafts” (1691) and “Wonders of the Invisible World” (1693) contain curious records and much interesting matter relative to satanic possession; ideas which were firmly believed at that time, not only in New England, but very generally throughout Europe also.

The most remarkable thing about Cotton Mather's literary career is the number of his writings; four hundred or more titles are included in the catalogue of his works. Many of these are fantastic treatises, grotesquely named, representing the vagaries of Puritan thought; many are sermons delivered on special occasions; three or four are interesting little books.

One, familiarly known under the title “Essays to do Good”, was cordially praised by Benjamin Franklin, who declared to the son of the writer that as a youth he had derived great benefit and inspiration from the book. But the great work of Cotton Mather's prolific industry was the famous “Magnalia Christi Americana”, or “Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord, 1698”. Something over a thousand pages of closely printed matter is included in the seven parts or volumes of this monumental work. The planting of New England and its growth, the lives of its governors and its famous divines, a history of Harvard College, the organization of the churches, "a faithful record of many wonderful Providences” -- such is the scope of the “Magnalia Christi Americana”, or “The Great Acts of Christ in America”.

The style is pedantic and artificial, but the spirit of the writer is perfectly sincere. Now and then the narrative grows simple and strong. There is a frequent use of Old Testament phraseology which indicates a clear perception of its poetical value.

The “Magnalia”, completed in December, 1697, was published at London in 1702. It stands fitly enough as the last important literary effort of seventeenth-century colonial Puritanism. Already there were indications of a change in the current of New England religious life. The old extreme Puritan doctrines were in a decline; and Mather's huge volume was a final utterance in defense of the fathers' faith. Not only had there come a change in the form of thought; in the style of literary expression, the change was as notable. English writers no longer followed the models of the later Elizabethan essayists; their fantastic phraseology had been displaced by the direct and forceful diction of Bunyan and Dryden; the easy, natural style of Addison, Steele, and Swift was giving a new charm to English prose. Cotton Mather lived throughout the first quarter of the eighteenth century; but in all essential respects, in personality and in utterance, he belongs wholly to the seventeenth. The consummate product of the old Puritan theology, he stands as the last important representative of the type in American literature.

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